New 'Phlashing' Attack Sabotages Hardware

yahoi writes "A new type of denial-of-service attack, called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS), damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. A researcher has discovered how to abuse firmware update mechanisms with what he calls 'phlashing' — a type of remote PDOS attack."

Comments

Read-only switch

[ettlz]

...or jumper. How much more would that cost?

I used to work with a Sys Admin like that

[MosesJones]

He used to be able to turn any working piece of kit into a piece of metal art in about 20 seconds, EVERYTHING was always a BIOS issue and he would NEVER check with anyone before replacing the BIOS.

Lets be clear about how dumb this person was, he had a BIOS that worked on his test servers and would then apply that to all the other servers INDEPENDENT OF HARDWARE OR OS. He would then start the machines (which of course wouldn't start) declare them "broken" and say the issue was with the software.

We did some low level hardware stuff in our software and it did break the boxes sometimes so it took 2 months of painful testing and debugging which found nothing, it only came about because one of the team had a heavy night and decided to "rest" in the server room and saw the moron apply the BIOS to a server that had been running and then scurry out to blame the team again.

Basic rule after then was BIOS set to read-only and locked down with a secure password, to this day my BIOS has a password thanks to the sheer physical shock of realising how dumb some people can be.

Hardware Virus

[Pikoro]

I seem to remember a virus back in the 486 days that would cause the hard drive to sweep back and forth between extremes and would keep sweeping until it hit some "resonant frequency" of the drive heads. At that point the heads would start oscillating on the vertical, causing it to strike the platter and physically damage the hard disc.

Anyone else remember this? I had only seen it once and have never been able to find a reference to it.

This would have been in the mid '90s. I have been wracking my brain over finding it since then.

Anyone else who has heard of this, reply and let me know.

Re:Hardware Virus

[Anonymous Coward]

I experimented with a technique (that worked) on the Commodore 64. You could address the floppy drive directly to move the drive head to the innermost position, which was on the opposite side of the "track 0" microswitch. Then you deliberately crash the CPU on the drive. When it POSTs it moves the head inward to track 0 to initialize. Since the head is on the wrong side of the switch it never gets there, makes a terrible noise, and gives up.

source of the name

[straponego]

PHLASH.EXE is the name of Phoenix's BIOS upgrade tool.

I am not making this up: less than a week ago, I woke up thinking: what to firmware, BIOS, TPM, and IPMI have in common? They'd all be great vectors for bricking a machine.

Re:I had no clue people still upgraded firmwares.

[Creepy Crawler]

That's the key: Reliable Enough. We dont need 100% availability, as it requires many redundant units (akin DRBD). I just have another WRT54G if this one burns out.

Business wise: I would go higher end as time==money. Better reliability can be afforded.

It does what I want it to do, and it does it well. And cheap.

Already done in 1998

[RickRussellTX]

Wasn't this already done by the CIH (later called Chernobyl) virus, circa 1998? There was even an e-mail variant of it, based on the Loveletter worm.

This is not really new..

[mengel]

I recall a friend of mine having a little routine for TRS-80's that would:

• wait for a key press
• for decreasing n
  • turn on the tape cassete relay
  • wait n cycles
  • turn off the tape cassete relay

this would cause an increasing pitch whine, followed by a little whiff of smoke from the cassette relay.

Something about the people there always saying "there's nothing you can type on the computer that will hurt it..."